This day in 1994 definitely wasn’t “crap” if you were a fan of surf-punk music, as Green Day released Dookie, their major label debut. (“Dookie”, for the record is slang for diarrhea, which apparently the band suffered from a lot back in the day, probably due to poor dietary habits and excesses of some other substances.)
Green Day were new to the masses but far from a new entity by this point. They’d formed a full eight years earlier, had released a couple of albums and several EPs on an indie label and had a solid following around their home base of Berkeley, California (a suburb of San Francisco sitting adjacent to Oakland.) They’d formed under the name Sweet Children in 1986 when childhood friends Billie Joe Armstrong, a singer and guitarist, and bassist Mike Dirnt joined with drummer John Kiffmeyer. The name was replaced with Green Day before they recorded any records; Sweet Children was being confused with another local band with a similar name and the boys liked a name that reflected their fondness for smoking a certain green herb. Kiffmeyer was replaced with German-born drummer Frank Edwin Wright III , aka Tre Cool, just after they released their first album 39/Smooth in 1990.
Their second full-length album, 1992’s Kerplunk, quickly garnered sales of 50 000 which was impressive for such a small label with no major distribution. (It’s worth noting that eventually the album was re-released on Reprise Records and went on to sell over a million copies.) That coupled with the band’s tireless touring and fun stage show got them noticed by several major labels and although they had multiple offers they signed on with Reprise , a division of Warner Bros., largely due to the interest of that company’s Rob Cavallo. Cavallo was a multi-talented musician in his own right and according to the band, “the only person we could really talk to and connect with.” Cavallo would also go on to sign the Goo Goo Dolls and produce not only Dookie but albums for Kid Rock and Phil Collins. Not surprisingly, by 2011, he was Chairman of Warner Bros. Records.
When he listened to the Green Day demo in his car, he “Sensed that [he] had stumbled onto something big,” and quickly booked them into Fantasy Studios. That happened to be “The House that Creedence Built”, the Bay Area’s most prestigious studio, used by CCR in their hay-day and later by artists like Journey, Sarah Mclachlan, Chris Isaak and the White Stripes, plus being where the sound for movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus was mixed. Since they’d already got the material written and practiced it wasn’t hard to get it all recorded inside of three weeks late in 1993. One song, ”Welcome to Paradise” was actually from their previous record, but re-recorded to sound more contiguous with the others. They didn’t quite get the sound they wanted at first, with them aiming for a Sex Pistols-like energy and rawness, so Cavallo re-mixed it to everyone’s approval and it was on shelves less than three months later. The rest is history.
It’s import wasn’t obvious at the time. Some media noticed it – Britain’s NME, for instance, reviewed it, giving it 7 out of 10 – others didn’t. Rolling Stone would eventually go on to name it the 30th best album of the ’90s and their readers chose it “Reader’s Choice Album of the Year” for 1994, yet the magazine itself apparently didn’t think it noteworthy enough to devote column space to when it first arrived.
Just as Nirvana’s Nevermind shook things up, so too did this one. Dookie took the energy and noise of Nirvana and other up-and-coming grunge acts but lightened it up some. With 14 or 15 songs crammed tightly into 41 minutes (the original CD lists 14 tracks but the last one, “F.O.D.” stops after 2:50 then, after a minute and sixteen seconds of silence leads into a hidden track, the Tre Cool-penned “All by Myself”, which is a separate track on the I-tunes version) it’s certainly has the pacing and urgency of punk, but for all the noise there’s a pretty strong sense of melody running through it. The New York Times called it an album that “only remotely resembled punk music…punk turns into pop.”
Punk or pop, fans ate it up. As the NME pointed out twenty years later, it proved “Teen rock …didn’t have to be all gloomy nihilism and angsty sonics. Dookie made rock fun again.” Others called it passionately apathetic. The loud, catchy tunes didn’t make many earth-shattering points; for the most part they were drawn from the band’s personal experiences.Much of that involved being bored and smoking pot. The single “Longview”, the first of 3 from the album to go to #1 on Billboard’s Alternative chart, is about “living in the suburbs in a sort of shit town where you can’t even pull in a good radio station,” according to Armstrong. “When I Come Around” was about a fight Billie Joe had with his then-girlfriend,(now wife) Adrienne that the band more or less put together while walking around San Francisco at night- something almost mirrored in the video. “Longview” and that song, and the videos which pulled into heavy rotation on MTV helped make the band household names quickly and let the album go all the way to #2 on Billboard. North of the border in Canada, as well as in Australia and New Zealand it was a #1 hit. Although initially lumped in with other California neo-punk acts like Rancid and the Offspring, Dookie soon put Green Day out ahead in the forefront of the ’90s Punk Revival scene.
The album won the Grammy for Best Alternative Album in 1995 and sold a staggering 20 million-plus copies worldwide, including about 10 million in the U.S., where as in Canada, it is certified Diamond status. It remains their biggest album to date, although they did come close a decade later with the more political American Idiot and its associated hits like “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Holiday.”
A spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 75 million albums sold and counting, five Grammys, even two Tony Awards (for their Broadway adaptation of American Idiot)- not bad going for a couple of slacker teens who decided to play music because their town was too boring!